Thursday, February 7, 2008

Scholarship Searches





Billions of dollars in scholarships are given each year to support students in pursuing a college education. Scholarships are "free money" because they don't need to be repaid. These scholarships — from foundations, companies, unions, community organizations, churches, and other groups — range from a few hundred dollars to a free ride for all years of college.

Searching for scholarships takes time and energy, but remember: It's free money. If you spend five hours applying for scholarships and receive only one $500 scholarship, that's the same as earning $100 an hour — not bad!

To make things easier, The Sallie Mae Fund offers the following free scholarship searches and other scholarship tips and information.

General Scholarship Search

Search a free scholarship database of scholarships worth over $2.8 million, to uncover scholarships for high school, college, grad, and adult students. Start your scholarship search now!

Black College Dollars

This free scholarship search, geared for African-American students, contains more than 300 scholarships searchable by GPA requirement, academic and career interest, and application deadline.

Latino College Dollars

This free scholarship search, geared for Hispanic students, contains clear information on more than 300 scholarships targeting Latino high school, undergraduate, and graduate students across the United States. This online resource is searchable by key categories such as grade level, GPA and citizenship.

Resources

The Internet: Many websites have large scholarship databases that will do the grunt work for you. Enter your criteria and they return a list of scholarships that match. Most sites are free and only require you to register to use their services. There are also many organizations that provide scholarships and/or links to scholarship resources. Some sites to check out are:

at